Pope Francis' ring is pictured as he speaks to the media aboard the papal flight to Brazil July 22, 2013. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

The great Southern writer and Catholic Flannery O’Connor once said that Catholics are called upon to suffer ever so much more from the Church than for her. These words came back to mind after the latest papal interview.

Once
againdo we not all know the drill by now?the pope gives an interview,
and the juiciest bits spread like wildfire, generating headlines such
as “Pope Says 2% of Priests are Pedophiles” (Wall Street Journal) and “Pope Francis reportedly promises 'solutions' to priests' celibacy”
(CBS News). And once again the papal spokesman, the unenviable Jesuit
Fr. Lombardi, had to “clarify” by saying “one cannot and one must not
speak in any way of an interview in the usual sense of the word.”
Lombardi could not publish a text of the interview as there was none,
and the whole thing was apparently a jerry-rigged reconstruction by an atheist journalist
of what he thought the pope said. Such a situation can only lead to
disaster as the pope’s trust is wantonly exploited. Thus we may never
know if the pope did or did not say the things attributed to him.
Certainly Lombardi claimed as much, saying that “the individual remarks…
cannot be confidently attributed to the Pope.”

What is one to do
with this? How does one answer the pointed question of a friend of mine,
who recently said: “I thought the Catholic Church was supposed to be in
the business of worshipping the Word made flesh, and thus knowing
something about using words properly. Why must every papal statement be
‘clarified’ by others? Why can’t the pope just get it right in the first
place?”

These are important questions, and though I find it
unseemly for a junior to offer gratuitous advice to a senior, especially
to a pope, and though I have a horror of autobiography, let me
nonetheless recount my own experience here as it illustrates only too
well the problems of unguarded commentary in the popular press. It seems
the popeand his spokesmanhave not learned the lessons I had to learn
about the agendas of the press.

Nearly a decade ago now, I began
indulging far too much my fondness for polemics and provoking outrage. I
brandished as my motto the wonderful aphorism of the French Catholic
writer Charles Péguy: “It will never be known what acts of cowardice
have been committed for fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.”
Attacking “progressive” Catholic causes provided fat, fun targets (“Sr.
Stretchpants” and other “weedy nuns” were two of my more uproarious
phrases friends quoted back at me endlessly), and so, being woefully
naive about how media operate with their own agendas, I penned a series
of op-eds for major Canadian newspapers on the ever-controverted topics
of the ordination of women and same-sex relations. I didn’t really
expect to change many minds, but I was rather going on the offensive (in
more ways than one) to push back against the constant nonsense one was
forced to read in the press, which never missed an opportunity to slag
the Church I love. I gleefully wrote slashing counter-attacks and used
hyperbolic language, justifying myself by appealing once more to the
acerbic Flannery O’Connor: “When you can assume that your audience holds
the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal
ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then
you have to make your vision apparent by shockto the hard of hearing
you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling
figures.”

Since then, I’ve had a bit more experience in the media,
including numerous TV and radio interviews in Canada, Europe, Asia, and
the US, and as a result I have been wholly disabused of my naïve notion
that journalistswhether in print, TV, radio, or on the Webfunction
purely as innocent deliverers of “facts” and can always be trusted to
get it right. They have a whole agenda of their own, and if you are not
careful you can get sucked into it. The agenda, of course, is that of
generating juicy headlines, selling newspapers, and making money.
Controversial statements from Catholics only help them to do that, in
the process creating sometimes huge “debts” for the Church long after
the journalists have pocketed their cheques.

As the largest religious body in the world, the Catholic Church
naturally gets a lot of attention, which is doubled when you are talking
about hot-button issues (almost always, invariably, having to do with
sex), and doubled again when the person doing the talking is the pope.
But the danger here, amply in evidence recently, is that papal
utterances, especially in interviews, create unnecessary problems for
the rest of us, sometimes for months or years afterwards.

I
spend my days teaching undergraduates who often have an abysmal
ignorance of Christianity, even for those who went to Catholic schools.
They can’t tell me if there are seven sacraments or seventy, and they
haven’t the slightest understanding of Catholic sexual morality, but you
can bet they can throw in your face Francis’ “Who am I to judge?” line whenever discussing homosexuality.

This whole trend of papal interviewswhich began with Saint John Paul II (if we count Crossing the Threshold of Hope)
and the emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, so I’m not singling out his
successoris not a development greatly to be encouraged; at the very
least, it should be used with extreme caution. The pope already has many
means for communicationhomilies, encyclicals, letters, apostolic
exhortations, and the Vatican website and radio and TV stations. The
problem with hearing too much of the pope is that it reinforces the idea
that if the pope hasn’t said something, it cannot be important.
Conversely, people assume that if the pope has said something, it trumps every other thing ever said about the topic from the Bible, Fathers, and Catechism
on down. Frequent papal utteranceseven the best onesoften reinforce
the cult of personality around his office that has been helpful to
nobody for the better part of a century.

If, however, we are going
to see high-profile papal interviews continue, then permit me to
suggest three changes that could benefit the Church.

First, the popes should consider a bit of advice from the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, founder of the journal, First Things: when
it is not necessary to speak, it is necessary to not speak. I have
started and abandoned many articles over the years and even an entire
book because I felt that what I was trying to say was not good enough to
publish, and might in fact cause skandalon in the Pauline sense of scandal: a stumbling block to someone seeking to draw near to Christ. So pace Freud,
sometimes suppressing your thoughts is in fact a good thing. The
greater your responsibility, the greater the impulse to suppress must be
given the greater possibility for misunderstanding and scandal.

Second,
popes need to learn the lesson I did: make your own audio and video
recording of any interview (and store the copies in a safe!), insist on
seeing the final text before publication, and keep copies of everything.
That way if, invariably, the press tries to spin something one way, you
have the documentary evidence to say “I never said that” or “that is
ripped out of context.” If the press won’t print a retraction or
correction, then throw the whole text or video up on the Vatican website
for people to see for themselves that the media tried to play fast and
loose.

Third, gimmicky though this sounds, perhaps the Vatican
Press Office should take a cue from the US Department of Homeland
Security and their color-coding of possible terrorist threats. Though
this would not deter the most tendentious of journalists from trying to
spin something as “papal” or “Catholic” teaching, it might help some
Catholics climb down from the ledge whenever they are confronted with
the dreaded opening line “In an interview today, the Pope said….”

Thus
we might see on the Vatican website clearly differentiated categories
of utterance. Since redand not whiteis the normal and historical color
for popes, we begin with that, and then the rest of the schemeto keep
things simplefollows universally recognized traffic patterns and
colors. Red means: stop and pay attention to this crucial matter. Yellow means “be cautious, look around, and see whether this affects you or not”. Green
means “carry on as before, slowing down to pay attention only if you
really want to but otherwise legitimately speeding past and minding your
own business.”

This might be clumsy in its
application, which is in fact a feature, not a bug. One side effect of
this, hopefully, would be to force a flowing in the prodigious volume of
materials coming out of Rome. Before anything could be published, it
would have to be color-coded and ranked, and the audience(s) to whom it
is relevant clearly indicated as well as the expected response(s), if
any.

A final salutary featurethe most importantof putting
everything through such a process would be that more than one person
would review something before it is published. As editor of an academic
revue (Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies) for well
over a decade now, I can tell you that the more sets of eyes on an
article the better because even the best editors miss things, and the
help from others can be invaluable in saving you from embarrassing or
costly mistakes. If Pope Francis wants to hire me, he only has to say
the word.

About the Author

Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille

Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille is Associate Professor and Chairman of the Department of Theology-Philosophy, University of Saint Francis (Fort Wayne, IN) and author of Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy (University of Notre Dame, 2011).

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